Wagner James Au reports on virtual worlds & VR

Tuesday, May 01, 2012

Second Life Problems Go Viral - Though Many Are Actually Linden Lab Problems

The Second Life Problems meme has gone crazy viral since I blogged about it last Friday, with nearly a couple hundred macros submitted by users. This one at the left is one of my favorites, because I'm pretty sure I resemble that remark. I was just complaining in a recent post that I have to use the third party Imprudence viewer, because the official viewer keeps crashing on me. Someone suggested that I just go and buy a new laptop (even though this one is less than 16 months old). To which my reply was: "My AlienWare M11x runs next generation AAA games like Skyrim just about perfectly, but somehow, can't run a client that's been around in some form for 10 years. Why should I spend $2000 to make up for Linden Lab's shortcomings?" Or to put it in a more apropos way, why does it seem SL users spend more time learning to deal with fundamental Second Life Problems, than the company that actually owns Second Life?

And come to think of it, looking at the Second Life Problems collection, many if not most of them are actually Linden Lab problems. Not entitled SLers complaining unrealistically about problems that are minor inconveniences, but about persistent shortcomings that have degraded the user experience for years, and still have yet to be repaired. Maybe we need a new meme?

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first off: "Dude you got a Dell". You know this right? Alienware is Dell.
Second you need to check the support site at dell for all updates including BIOS updates. Then get the updates for the video driver.

I think the reason so many are willing to put up with LL's glitches and what not are possibly a great deal of SL users aren't trying other 3D environment games like Skyrim or Team Fortress 2, Call of Duty. Thus limiting their exposure to excellent performance. Let's face it. A day of not crashing or making it over 10-15 sim crossings in a row without crashing is considered good performance.

Those are all MMO's. Hell, Team Fortress 2 is completely free for windows and Mac users on Steam. You want a free way to see how great a 3D world experience can be, at the risk of being shot, burnt, stabbed, zapped, baseball batted or frying panned to death, check out that game.

If I may... I have a 4 year old HP laptop. It's nothing spectacular at all -- just dual core 1.8Ghz Turian and an embedded Nvidia graphics processor under the hood. Only 4G of ram too.

And yet even this limited machine runs SL just fine with viewer 3 from LL. Just fine and dandy. You have to turn down a number of things graphic wise, but that's the price you pay for running SL on any limited box, no matter what viewer. So if you run Imprudence because your machine can't run the LL viewer, my much less powerful laptop and I are running V3 without any troubles at all.

As much as this Mac OS diehard would love to rib you about your laptop, I won't (too much). You write,

"Why should I spend $2000 to make up for Linden Lab's shortcomings"

It's ridiculous that anyone would even suggest replacing such a recently purchased Alienware machine. And it's another coffin-nail to this educator that any app our (slowly shrinking) SL niche uses would require that sort of regular upgrade.

Schools are on three and five-year replacement cycles now, and you can bet that we are not buying anything like Windows or Mac OS pro-level products for labs.

As for students? They are switching to tablets slowly. Tell that to LL, since they seem to heed you more than their user base.

No one should call you a LL fanboy any longer, Hamlet. Well said here.

PS: Firestorm runs smoothly as Hermes silk on my24-month old MacBook Pro. That's okay, as I don't play other games (SL increasingly being a sandbox game to me and less and less a world). For Mass Effect, which I will treat myself to soon, I'll buy a console.

To fix the problem completely uninstall the Secondlife Viewer. Then find the PC specific settings files for Secondlife (it's location will vary on how you set it up) but if you have Windows 7 will be something like C:\Users\your_id\Appdata\Roaming\SecondLife.

If this does not work check that you are using the latest driver (yes, they are Ati on your machine so will be worse than Nvidia's for SL but will work).

People giving me long-ass technical explanations on how to fix my problems -- it's sweet and I'm grateful, but seriously, when you think about it, it's crazy. Why should I spend an hour or two tinkering on software when it should just WORK BY NOW? Client is 10 fucking years old. Company has been profitable for about 5 years. Yet SLers are still doing free tech support and SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT on behalf of a for-profit company LIKE THAT'S NORMAL. Why?

If I may suggest...have you tried going into the V3 preferences/graphics/hardware button uncheck VBO (vertex buffer objects)? This is the number 1 reason for a viewer crash or other odd situations with viewers (if not 1 then the top 3). And by default it is on 99% of the time.

It amazes me so many people have never heard of this setting and why LL turns it ON by default still boggles the mind. In my experience it does nothing but create problems.

A 2011 iMac - runs SL amazingly well even with shadows and ambient on. Gets down to 15-20fps with shadows, 5-10 with ambient. 30-60fps otherwise. Runs -faster- when I load myself up with mesh and cut down on sculpties. Set render range usually between 64 and 128 with no performance hit. I prefer low though just to keep out clutter when exploring. Regularly make screenshots in ultra settings at 512 range.
- Cost: $1000. It was the cheapest iMac on the line.

A 2009 Toshiba laptop, e5, l5, or something - runs SL well in medium settings. Not with shadows and all that. No impact either way from mesh or sculpties. Keep graphics range at 64 to 96, starts to lag above that.
- Cost: $350.

Everyone can handle the Toshiba, and the one for $350 today is a lot better than the one I bought then. The iMac is a little more of a hit - but if you use a lot of i-stuff, might be worth it for 'look and feel consistency'.

NO ONE with an outdated machine has any business complaining about SL being out of date.

I'v been reading for a while now all sorts of blogs and posts from people who complain that LLs doesn't update anything, or is out of date, and so on... and when put to task, they admit to using Phoenix or Imprudence or something...
- Viewers from 2009.

Well yeah... no wonder SL looks outdated to these folks.

They are outdated.

Its 2012 - folks who are missing 3 years of updates... guess what?

YOU'RE MISSING 3 YEARS OF UPDATES.

Some folks know this and blame, rightly, they're outdated systems, and lament that they cannot afford new ones.
- I can sympathize with these people. Its rough being on the back end of a tech-lifeycle and unable to upgrade.

Before I bought my Toshiba, my Desktop was a 2000 PC, and my laptop a 2003 iBook. I get having outdated hardware and not being able to use 70% of the internet.

But I knew it was me. I didn't blame teh interwebs for leaving me in the dust... I blamed the economy for leaving me unemployed for so long... and the student budget I had while trying to retool and get back in.

I have no sympathy for the folks on old tech and V1 who blame LLs for their problems.

That's like jaywalking on the freeway and blaming the car that runs you over...

ps: My 2003 iBook runs v1 just fine. I get about 5-10fps because the thing has so little ram and no graphics board - but it runs and I can stay in my skybox and get fps up enough above that to see my AO smoothly. That's because v1 may be 2009 for its last update, but that was a minor update. Its really a 2003 application.

So really, anyone on V1 is really 9 years out of date with current software...

"Schools are on three and five-year replacement cycles now, and you can bet that we are not buying anything like Windows or Mac OS pro-level products for labs.

As for students? They are switching to tablets slowly. Tell that to LL, since they seem to heed you more than their user base."

Took a class at my local community college recently. The labs were -all- kitted out with 2010 era Mac pro desktops, with full installs of Adobe's CS5 product line, and a host of other things not related to my course.

The students were running around with Mac and PC laptops. I saw 2 people with tablets...

A Tablet is a crippled machine. Its a smartphone with a bigger screen and no phone... It won't even run most office / word processing software. Let alone graphics applications like Photoshop and Illustrator or 3dsMax that are used for many courses.

Laptops are killing the desktop market, sure. That makes sense.

Tablets are a new fangled gadget, like the Laser Disc player, that in a few years will either become laptops in what they run, or fade away.
- People need a mobile computer that can, at least, be used to take notes and write a school report. But ideally, that they can play their video games on, like say... WoW or Guild Wars, and do their school work with. Tablets won't run things like SAS for a statistics or humanities course, they won't run things like RapidWrite for legal work (much of which is still stored in WordPerfect format), and the list could just go on for what they can't yet do. Some of which is a matter of writing new apps - some of which is fundamental to the limits of their hardware.

I don't get all the complaining about the LL v.3 crashing. I am using it on a MacBook Air, a MacBook Pro and a Mac Pro and I never (never!) have experienced it crashing. There must be some other issues outside of the viewer itself.

Over the years I've used all of the non-LL viewers in addition to the LL series of viewers and now I choose to use LL v.3 all the time. It meets all of my needs well. I think at this point it just comes down to a Ford vs. Chevy kind of argument, which never is settled.

I love that most of the comments thread isn't agreement or disagreement with the premise of the post, but opining on how Hamlet is wrong about his computer's functionality, and what he should Do About It- as if he probably hasn't done metric tons of troubleshooting himself.

Everyone can agree all the problems and troubleshooting shouldn't be, and it is good to remind ourselves every now and then that we're numb to it and that shouldn't be the case...but the issues are what they are.

Minus a call to action like a strike from using SL until Linden Lab prioritizes fixing the client instead of buying other companies and working on new projects, all anyone can do is troubleshoot and suggest to others that they troubleshoot. Troubleshooting is at least productive while complaining without action isn't.

@Elerhi - I don't personally give an owls pellet if Hamlet uses V3, Imprudence, or some 40x80 ascii rendering thing he found on a USB stick that fell out of a dumpster. But his argument that his topend rig cannot run LL's software when my puny 4 year old lappy can, doesn't hold water with me.

No, we shouldn't have to delete folders and tweak settings. Guess what -- we have to, especially if we call ourselves computer geeks. If you don't like tweaking, then turn in your computer geek membership card and your TIProgrammer. SL is not a mainstream product, thus you cannot treat it like one. It's a barely functional heap of free software routines and graphics modules found on an old 9track tape and held together with prayers to the goddess Ada, all designed to melt silicon. The terrible design flaws in the installer only barely scratch the surface of LL's problems. But don't blame the viewer when it's the user who can't be bothered to follow well known steps to get a modern viewer to work on a modern computer. While the installer could stand some work, the viewer itself works fine on a computer not even half as powerful as yours.

See what I mean? This is not a problem that either Linden Lab or the makers of Skyrim can solve. These issues have always been part of the Microsoft Windows experience, and all you can do about it is avoid Microsoft Windows.

Linden Lab would be really surprised to hear that. They've been saying otherwise for, oh, at least 6 years. Why not take them at their word?

"avoid Microsoft Windows... consider switching to a system that maintains itself, e.g. Ubuntu."

Again, I look at suggestions like this and say wow, just wow. So in order to get a better performing Second Life, I should... GIVE UP MY EXISTING OPERATING SYSTEM AND SWITCH TO AN OS WHICH, WHILE STABLE, HAS FAR FAR FAR LESS SOFTWARE OPTIONS OR COMMERCIAL SUPPORT.

MS makes the OS, not the graphics hardware or anything else for that matter...just the operating system and that's not the issue here.

I would bet it is some errant setting within the graphics control panel or the viewer itself that is causing such a problem. I am not sure if the MX11 is the model that has a hybrid setup where it can switch between onboard or let the gpu do it's thing. (this is a battery life feature I think?) You may have to specify that in the settings.

This is the reason I keep trying SL and quitting again and again. It doesn't run. I expect bare-minimum performance stability with my games. SL has never met this expectation on any rig I've ever owned.

I debug computer systems as my day job. It's just not worth it to me to fight with a game when I have a bog-standard box at home. It's not like it has any weird surprises that I expect would send SL into fits.

Anyway - if Linden Labs would step up the development to produce a more - stable/professional/polished/responsive product, I would leap at the chance to try SL again. I try again every year or so, like clockwork, because I want so hard for it to work and be awesome.

"So in order to get a better performing Second Life, I should... GIVE UP MY EXISTING OPERATING SYSTEM AND SWITCH TO AN OS WHICH, WHILE STABLE, HAS FAR FAR FAR LESS SOFTWARE OPTIONS OR COMMERCIAL SUPPORT."

I didn't say you should give up Windows. I merely pointed out that poor system maintenance is your problem. Your hardware is fine, and so is Linden Lab's viewer.

Speaking of commercial support, why don't you just pay someone to make SL run on your rig if you can't do it yourself?

They can tell me that it's raining, but I know what is really hitting my shoes... Why not take them at their word? Because they've broken their word and broken their trust with me repeatedly. How's that sound to you?

If they want people to treat their product as a mainstream item, then the product has to be stable. It has to install correctly for average people. It has to work for people who are not computer geeks or engineers. And it has to provide a function for the people who use it.

SL provides all but four of these things. It could be improved and made INTO a mainstream product. But if you cannot run it when you install it the first time because it sets every graphics feature to MAX for certain mainstream cards, or reinstalling causes crashes because of files not deleted by the installer, Ma and Pa Kettle are not going to join you for a round of kumbaya around the pixel fire, no matter if the sim is named Mainstream or not.

LL spends a lot of time worrying about making SL work for people with sub-par machines. A lot of time. And suggestions that they make some sort of analysis of machines as they log on and say some subtle version of "your sh*t is weak" are rebuffed. Instead they try to come up with web-based viewer or stripped-down viewer or don't demand people adapt to mesh or kill 1.23. In catering to the lowest common denominator, they risk losing the rest of us.

The problem with most of these folks is that they have been living in the belly of the beast so long they fail to realize that the poor critter has got terminal cancer and is dying. Yes oh please lets all go out and buy an OSX box or format and reload ubuntu on top of the existing operating system or dance a funny little dance and hold our Iphone at a particular angle so it works. The clue-clue train left the station and many forgot to get on board.
Proposition 1: Secondlife for various reasons is dying most likely as a result of Linden Labs lack of vision. This seemed obvious to me back in 08 or 07. So this is the company that had this "remarkable technology" that they didn't know a. how to market it and b. what to convince others to do with it. We saw them try to sell it to businesses and education and then shoot themselves in the foot. I saw the central flaw in their reasoning based on what Hamlet descibes today back around 2008. Even back then pretty extravagant demands for either a "business communication/collaboration tool" or an education tool. In a post 911 economy and certainly post mortgage market fail economy... kind of a hard sell to tell people they need what many would feel is unecessary fluff. Oh yeah expensive unecessary fluff either from the client machine requirements or the well documented costs of v-land.

Face the facts folks in a larger sense SL would have never worked in business or one could argue education (sorry iggy) with the costs of land and pc/mac hardware demands. Then you add problematic support and unreliable viewer software and at times (for a while very frequently) Server outages. All good things for a either business with salaried people waiting for the damned thing to work or educators looking like a deer in the headlights in front of classroom of students with some new inexplicable (not in their control) problem on their hands. Then add to the mix griefing porn and sexual deviancy always handy in education and business environments.

SL was fun while it lasted but face the facts the thing is dead and Linden Labs (being ever the clueless ones) fails to realize it.

Many of us fail to log in nearly as much as we used to and many of the blogs online have quietly grown a layer of moss over their posts. NWN is one of the few still pushing out stuff on a regular basis and even then it has many posts about facebook, ninecraft or other diversions.

Dress in black wear a black arm-band whatever... its just time to go to the funeral folks............

Since I joined SL in 2006, I installed Linden Lab's viewers on six different machines. Even on the weakest of them, a $300 netbook PC with Intel Atom CPU and Nvidia Ion chipset and 2GB RAM, I managed to get at least 20fps. I also managed to stay logged in for more than 24 hours in a single session once I tried that.

People need to keep in mind that the SL viewer is 99% cross-platform code, i.e. it does things the same way on all three supported operating systems. This means that any perceived difference in stability or performance is due to the underlying platform and drivers and beyond Linden Lab's control. If your or Hamlet's experience were widespread, the Lab would know about it because their viewer collects system stats and performance data during every session. The Lab knows which OS you run on what kind of hardware and how fast your graphics card is.

Well when I log in and get 1 FPS on viewer 3, and go back to Kirstens old viewer 2 and get perfect frame rates, I sort of really could give 2 shits about getting viewer 3 to work. Last thing I need to do is futz with my system so the old one doesn't work AND the new one doesn't work.

As Hamlet said, I am not going to trouble shoot for 10 hours to get something to work that should work out of the box.

Also good for you Ann, Im sure you have draw distance to 60 meters and lights and shadows off. Great time.

My research so far suggests (and I did a lot since my special case was that I did not even get an SL log-in screen anymore) that the source of your and many people's problem originates from ATI and not from LL. Their NEW graphic card drivers seem not to work correctly for ALL (or at least many) openGL based programms. ATI seems to have stopped to properly test their drivers for openGL features (the problems with the drivers for some of their cards seem to go back for 3 Months now).

A workable solution for most users (at least for all people having an ATI "HD" card) seems to be to switch the Windows desktop to the "basic settings" (disabling transparency features etc).

But at this point (possible solution) comes the BIG LL failure into play: Instead of communicating this problem and informing people about possible solutions, they are mute. And the second big problem is the amateure SL community that gives - in this case - stupid tips as some comments to your blog post suggest: "download the newest drivers" (which ARE the problem), "buy a new computer system", use your onboard graphics card instead of your 500$ top notch product, bla bla bla... Misleading tips from people that have obviously no clue.

So the origin of the problem might not be on LL's side, but the way of dealing with it is a total desaster!

But then its the time to remind that there are Non profit words that don't depend on the lab anymore or commercial projects as well!
Now back to the topic.
Laptop!
Sorry to say but just the fact that any logs in with a laptop, no matter how powerful it will be, it will end always in a deceptive view of what Second Life or Any other virtual World can offer!
So 1st point, forget the use of Second Life on laptops or even worse, on smaller screens then 23'

In all i can run, not one but 2 or 3 instances of Second live, running full specs but no shadows.
In all i got avarage fps around:
1st - 64
2nd - 32
2th - 34

Only in my 1st i have a mesh viewer (in fact i have all TPV viewers installed, yesterday latest Niran's, plus Exodus, Zen, Firesorm, Singularity, Cool viewer, Rlv, Catnip, Dolphin and non mesh like Phoenix and Imprudence)
on the other 2 i still have only Imprudence beta and Phoenix pre mesh!
So the Fps above are using a pre mesh viewer, be imprudence or Phoenix (v1.4 beta and v1.1.185)
At max settings, with forced hardware to use 116Hq anisotropic filtering!
On my 1st computer, i run all mesh viewers with max settings in viewer and full shadows!
(v3 versions only, v1 based i run them with same graphics as pre mesh but in viewer anisotropic filtering (4x))
All tests are done at my homestead and at a racing sim, driving a Nascar car really fast and on a well known adult club that is normally full!
1st conclusion, mesh viewers are faster with shadows then pre mesh ones without them!
Around 5 fps higher on any place then pre mesh ones!
Simple reason, anisotropic filtering is locked at 4af while pre mesh use 16HQaf!
While that can be good, as in fact my average fps are higher (instead of 64 i got 80 on a standard base, with 1024 draw distance, max avatars 50, lod 4, all settings at the max)
The truth is that quality of image is very deteriorated using amesh viewer so no matter what i can afford not using them and use still the one i feel (and im not alone, at least another person with a similar computer feels the same!)it gives me the best of graphics quality and that is:
Imprudence Beta v.14 OSgrid version!

And btw, none crashed, be pre mesh or Mesh, unless on usual crossing sims!
So Hamlet, Virtual Worlds are not for kids, and not for their tools as well!
They are a niche, for the oens that really enjoy graphics and for that you will have to use always, the best hardware you can have, and the newer, cause if any can runs SL at minimum settings, Any really needs to feel it at max settings with shadows or not, but at 64 Fps minimum!

The M11X and Metacam Oh's 5800 both use Optimus technology, which means there is a low power (slow) video and and very fast video card. There are multiple serious bugs in the Dell video driver which prevent the viewer from detecting and using the fast card. Hence, 1 FPS. The Lindens did a thorough investigation of this and it is not the Labs fault. Drivers have been available to fix this issue since last August.

Masami Kuramoto is worth repeating: "People need to keep in mind that the SL viewer is 99% cross-platform code, i.e. it does things the same way on all three supported operating systems. This means that any perceived difference in stability or performance is due to the underlying platform and drivers and beyond Linden Lab's control"

The low performance of Metacam Oh's system and Hamlet's performance and crashing issues look identical to ones I and others have beaten out of multiple Alienware boxes by replacing and tuning the drivers. This includes a brand new Alienware M17X purchased a few weeks ago. So blame Dell for shipping old junk.

You need to remove the old driver, de-OEM the machine from the Dell custom crap driver, and install a better Nvidia driver that has the patches in it. You should then see 30-60 fps with no crashes in ultra mode on the M11X and maybe half that on the 5800, which is a bit brain damaged. I have done this to multiple Optimus systems and it works.

Hamlet, you should also set up a custom profile for your viewer in the Nvidia (or ATI) control panel, then turn off the settings in the viewer that do all the work in software, and put those 72 M11X video processors to work for you.

I don't blame Dell. You know why? Because Portal 2, Deus Ex, Call of Duty, and Skyrim run perfectly on my machine, without me having to tweak anything. This is likely because developers with major publishers and studios work directly with leading laptop retailers like Dell to make sure their games run well on their hardware. And if there's problems, they auto-patch them. How come you don't expect Linden Lab to do the same?

Coincidence. If you check out the Alienware Arena message board, you'll find plenty of reports about similar issues with those mainstream games. It likely depends on the computer's date of purchase and the version number of Dell's software bundle.

"And if there's problems, they auto-patch them. How come you don't expect Linden Lab to do the same?"

Linden Lab's viewer does have an auto-update feature, but no one would expect Linden Lab, EA, Valve or any other games publisher to update a system's display drivers.

As Ferd explained above, Alienware PCs are shipped with OEM display drivers. This means that no one except Dell can provide an auto-update feature. Since they don't seem to do that, your only option is to replace the OEM driver with the original Nvidia one. At that point you may be able to use Nvidia's auto-update feature.

Consider yourself lucky that Nvidia offers such an upgrade path at all. Years ago I had a laptop with an ATI graphics adapter that was _locked_ into Acer's bundled OEM drivers (by using a vendor-specific PCI device ID), i.e. the original ATI driver for Windows simply refused to install! (Ironically, the ATI driver for Linux ignored the device ID and installed just fine.)

'This is likely because developers with major publishers and studios work directly with leading laptop retailers like Dell to make sure their games run well on their hardware. And if there's problems, they auto-patch them. How come you don't expect Linden Lab to do the same?'

Second Life like some other games is based around OpenGL - Nvidia cards handle this better than Ati's offerings.

I agree that Second Life should work 'out of the box' to a decent degree on anyone's setup, but you will find other software that doesn't - though it is true that Second Life needs more than similarly sized pieces of software that I use.